Five students from the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science (CNS) Center at SICE participated in the Indy Big Data Conference 2017 Visualization Challenge, which asked participants to track Indiana’s highest area of opioid abuse and identify up to 10 contributing factors to the abuse using data sets provided by the conference. The challenge looked for animations, heat maps, or other visualizations that could illustrate the highest areas of opioid abuse to leaders in the state of Indiana.

“Data visualization is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal when it comes to identifying problems and guiding pathways to solutions,” said Katy Börner, Victor H. Yngve Professor and director of the CNS Center, who also is one of the supervisors of the project. “The opioid problem is one that really impacts communities, and providing a meaningful...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The National Science Foundation has awarded Indiana University nearly $3 million to train future research leaders in the skills needed to tackle society's most urgent subjects.

"The biggest challenges currently faced by society require large teams of people who are 'fluent' in more than one scientific discipline," said Luis Rocha, professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing, who will lead the new program. "But the current education model in academia is still largely focused on training researchers who know how to set up independent labs with agendas driven by a single person.

"If we want to take on the really big problems, we've got to create more scientists with deep expertise in multiple areas."

The highly selective grant from the NSF's Research Traineeship Award will create a dual Ph.D. program at IU to train graduate students to be proficient in both a specific discipline, such as psychology or political science, as well as network and data science. IU is one of only 17 institutions...